Continuing
the Minstrel's Tale down along the Costa BlancaThe events portrayed in this
series are not necessarily in chronological order

I have won several prizes as the world's
slowest alto player, as well as a special
award in 1961 for quietness.Paul Desmond

Chapter Ten

Royalties

March 2004. Today I received my first royalties from the British Musicians'
Union. They sent me a cheque for £16 less 20% tax. I don't know
what it is for. I am no longer even a member. They threw me out in the
1960s for moving to Germany and making more money. Before that I had played
on hundreds of broadcasts, films, television shows and recordings and
the MU has only recently decided to pay us the royalties that had been
collected for us at the time. This was the first payment, apparently.
Meanwhile, on television, I'm watching daily a great many of those films
and television shows I played on, for which I should have at least been
paid repeat money years ago, and still waiting...and waiting...

In Germany they have a marvellous musicians' union, run by lawyers, and
they don't take stick from anybody. The same people also run the royalty
company very efficiently, well they would, wouldn't they, and every working
musician receives another twelve-and-a-half percent of his year's salary
at Christmas. The royalties are for interpretation of the music they play.
As the old song goes, Ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.
Think I'll frame that cheque.

Our small group played at a big festival in the town of Alcoy, known
as the City of Bridges. Alcoy still is a very modern and up to date textile
area, the centre of the textile trade for Spain. This is a great town
several kilometres inland from the Costa Blanca coast, situated on a large
ravine. We drove for hours through the mountains to get to the place.
Halfway there we stopped for some refreshment at a small wayside cafe.
The place was deserted but there was a lot of noise going on somewhere
else in the building so I took my beer along to investigate. I opened
one of the doors and stepped into a huge room, like an aircraft hangar.
It was brightly lit but there was a haze of cigarette smoke that gave
it a kind of surreal atmosphere. The walls were painted with outdoor views,
and there was a road that disappeared into the haze, so it was just like
being outdoors..

Standing around on both sides of the road were about two hundred young
men. As I was about to cross over the road a man by the door grabbed my
arm and told me to wait. At that moment a dozen or so Formula One racing
cars roared around a bend I hadn't noticed and streaked past at a terrific
speed, weaving and dodging and trying pass one another. In a moment they
were gone again.

The cars were each around a couple of feet in length and they looked
to me to be correct in every detail. A bunch of guys were standing up
on a raised platform on the other side of the road. As my eyes grew accustomed
to the place I could see that the road was actually curved and formed
an enormous race track. The men on the platform were controlling the cars
by radio. As I watched they thundered round once more. Now one of the
cars was way out in front. It was a red Ferrari, what else?

When we arrived in Alcoy we drove over the bridge, then down over the
bottom of the ravine and eventually had to fight our way up a narrow street
that had brass bands and brightly costumed girls thronging the road. Everyone
was going in our direction and they banged happily on the sides of the
car as we crept along through them. A bandstand had been erected for us
at the bottom of a road leading up to a large square, where most of the
main action seemed to be. As the road went steeply uphill the legs of
the bandstand at the front were shorter than those at the back. Our bass
player thus sat behind us right on the edge of a terrifying twenty-foot
drop. He was Tubby Dunn, who left shortly afterwards to play at Ronnie
Scott's Club in Birmingham. I believe it was Tubby who once told me that
his Granny had lived next door to Al Capone in New York, when Al was a
lad, but don't quote me on this.

While the stand was being set up I went into a nearby bar and found it
to be full of bandsmen, including a couple of bands I'd seen around in
the Costa Blanca area. I got into conversation with some of the guys and
they showed me their instruments. Every one of the trumpet players had
a brand new Vincent Bach trumpet, all paid for by his local council. There
must have been a hundred Bach trumpets in there. Most of the guys in there
were playing hot licks so the noise was pretty fearsome.

We played for an hour or so. The reaction from the people was amazing.
They had probably never heard a band like ours before, stuck as they were
away in the mountains. They packed the area around the bandstand solidly
the whole time we played and clapped everything we gave them. Whenever
we finished a number a brass band further up in the square could be heard
thumping away. It must have made the most interesting stereo effect for
the people walking up the road away from us.

I remember a Bob Sharples experiment in the early days of stereo recording,
where he had two bands marching around in single file inside the Conway
Hall past two fixed microphones to get the approaching and fading sounds
of marching bands. I was leading one of the bands and Bobby Pratt the
other. Every time we were halfway around the studio we used to kick over
chairs and instrument cases and things to give the guys coming from the
other direction a hard time getting past them. I don't know what happened
to that recording. Maybe the cheque for £16 less 20% tax represented
the royalties for that Sharples recording. Haha! We'd received a measly
£8 for itthat was the union rate in those days, so I've actually
come out on top. I think.

In the interval I found a young English woman waiting for me when I came
off the stand. I don't know why she was waiting for me in particular,
but there she was and there I was so we had a long chat about the band,
and the music, Alcoy and things in general. I asked her where she came
from.

"Oh, it's a place near Southend," she said. "You'll have
never heard of it."

"Well I went to school in Southend for a while when I was nine,"
I said. "Then we went and lived in a little village nearby called
Hockley. Went to school there in Hawkwell. Hockley and Hawkwell, that
was the name of our railway station."

Her jaw dropped and for a moment she stood staring at me as if she had
just seen a ghost. Then she said, "Don't go away!" and rushed
off. A moment later she was back, dragging her husband behind her.

"Say that again!" she demanded, breathless with excitement.
So I said it again and had the satisfaction of now seeing his jaw
drop. I even remembered the name of my schoolteacher in nearby Hawkwell.
Miss Leighfield. I was ten years old and madly in love with her. The woman
looked at her husband triumphantly. He took out his pocket book and handed
me a card and damn me if they didn't live in Hawkwell.

Well I've had all kinds of coincidences like that in my life; met friends
in the most unexpected parts of the world. The trombonist Jock Bain told
me about a coincidence of his own once. He was on a tour of Japan with
Mantovani's orchestra and had taken an afternoon walk around Tokyo. After
a while he realised that he was totally lost. None of the signposts or
street names made any sense to him. He couldn't find anyone who understood
what he was trying to ask them. Finally he stood, dejected, on a street
corner and wondered what he was going to do next.

There was a tap on his shoulder. He turned, and there was George Melachrino
standing behind him. George conducted one of the finest orchestras in
Britain at the time, and had, among his many other achievements, conducted
the famous wartime British Band of the AEFthe British counterpart
to the Glenn Miller Band. He shouldn't have been in Japan at all, but
here he suddenly was.

"What are you doing here?" asked George. "No, what are
you doing here?" said Jock. "Well, I'm lost," said George.
"So am I," said Jock. So they did the only thing that two friends
who were hopelessly lost could dothey went into a pub and let the
rest of the world go by.

Jock told me all that while we were sitting in the orchestra pit doing
a Sunday Night at the London Palladium television show. I had a much more
terrifying story told me by the trombonist Jack Smith, Wally Smith's older
brother, who was doing a dep for Laddy Busby one night in the West Side
Story orchestra.

Jack had been in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War and had
been en route to Murmansk in the ill-fated PQ18 convoy when his cargo
ship had been torpedoed by a German submarine. He had been catapulted
into the icy Arctic water while his ship sank nearby. He said that what
people say about all of your life passing before your eyes when you are
in danger of drowning is true. He knew that five minutes was the most
anyone could survive in those Arctic temperatures. Luckily for him, and
for the rest of us, he was rescued in the nick of time. The story gave
me the horrors then and still does now when I think of it.

Eric Delaney, living now most of the time in Benidorm, quite often asks
me to do big band arrangements for him for various solo appearances he
does now and then. One of them was for a concert he played up in Edinburgh.
He gave me the band parts of his small group and I had to construct the
big band scores out of them. I was shocked at how bad the arrangements
had been. I had heard that small band many times in the 1950s, with a
front line of Tony Fisher playing the trumpet parts, an alto sax player
and a Hammond Organ adding block chords to whatever they were playing
to fill out the harmonies. It says a lot for those players that it sounded
any good at all, and it was sensational. But the parts were mostly wrong,
illegible, badly copied, you name it. Sometimes there would be two versions
of the same arrangement and those parts would also be wrong. I wrote him
about five new big band scores and he came back after the concert and
said they had been great. And guess whatthe band accompanying him
had been.....wait for it..... Tommy Sampson!

Last year Eric played at a big band dance in the Benidorm Palace. This
was a band made up of the Tailgate band, with its new leader, with several
Spanish players to make up the number. Eric was playing drums. I went
along to the rehearsal and took my trumpet because I knew that half the
band wouldn't be turning up. I had previously asked the bandleader what
they were going to do about waltzes. I knew the big band book because
I'd written quite a lot of it and played it, too, and there were no waltzes.

He replied that he understood that the majority of the people coming
would be Norwegian, and, as they only liked to dance to the quicker old
time waltzes, probably because of the cold up there, he wouldn't be needing
any of the usual stuff. Eric then took me aside and asked me to write
some slow waltzes for the big band, so I did him four extremely romantic
scores, and threw in a couple of Latin American things as well. I reckoned
that they could also use the small group on waltzes if they got stuck.
No one would notice. I'd forgotten that I'd written all their waltzes
for the girl singer, and that night there'd be no singer.

I saw the bandleader not long after the concert. He said there had been
hardly anyone in there at all, and that the band had run out of music
at midnight. Of course they had. The big band had only played jazz music
on concerts in the past. All they had rehearsed the day I'd been there
were three or four Basie numbers. The organiser hadn't taken into account
that the band had no dance music. When I asked how my waltzes had been
received it was the first he had heard of them. After all the work I'd
done on them Eric had forgotten to take them along with him.